Bravo has been recognised at the 2021 Marketing Excellence Awards for its campaign Merlin, created in collaboration with DBS SME Banking.

The campaign reimagines how banks speak to small and medium businesses. Moving away from conventional finance marketing, Merlin replaced industry jargon and formal visuals with wit, clarity and visual metaphors. Each piece of creative was designed to feel human, relevant, and disarming—delivering product messages through simple, intelligent storytelling.

Deployed across DBS’s IDEAL platform, email and LinkedIn, the campaign tested conventional ‘bank speak’ against its more irreverent counterpart. The results showed a clear shift in engagement, with a 680% uplift in business impact and a highest-performing creative reaching a 12% click-through rate.

The work was awarded under the category of Excellence in B2B Marketing.